jonathan909

OTA software updates for cars creep me TFO.

Oh, piffle. I have yet to replace a water pump, either due to failure - or unnecessarily.

Fwiw, years back when my '95 OBW's EJ22 chipped a valve, it was at the beginning of a nasty winter and I knew I wasn't going to be able to do anything about it until spring, but needed to keep the car running. I wasn't even thinking of what the unburned gas would do to the cat; I just didn't want to waste gas by pumping it into a cylinder that I knew wasn't going to be burning it. So I unplugged the injector and ran 'er on three until the weather turned.

I can't imagine any downside to trying. It's gonna set you back what - five bucks? - and certainly won't make it any worse.

My second '01 H6 OBW HG job of the summer is done and seems to be running well, so back to this... What year range of Forester will yield suitable springs for this? There's a pretty decent assortment from '98-'11 in the local P'n'P yards at the moment, and it would be great to fetch a set before the snow falls and working out there becomes unpleasant.

Sending unit failures may be very rare, but they're so quick+painless to change that it's crazy not to try it first. The only oil pressure related problem I've ever had was four or five years ago - my wife was en route home from work (an hour drive) in the '98 EJ22 OBW when the idiot light came on. I told her to stop right where she was and have it towed home. Unscrewed the sender, screwed in a gauge, verified pressure, stuffed in a used junkbox replacement, and it's still on the road. Why get caught up in complicated speculation rather than trying the easiest fix first?

Amazing - I didn't recognize it.

Damn, that's brilliant.

Some folks vote for... no, better not. Okay as a battlefield fix, but otherwise not my style. Call me anal-retentive, but I like cleaning up loose ends properly.

Shipping would be slow and/or prohibitively expensive... but... lookit that - they have a Calgary dealer. I'll check with those guys.

Now that I'm piecing this thing back together, one of those little details is broken locking tabs on a couple of the (3-pin spark plug) coil pack connectors. None of my other engines use these things, they all have the coil pack on the manifold. So I know which cars in the junkyard are likely to provide replacements, can anyone tell me when and where they started using these in the H4?

Damn straight, bubba.

1. Kids these days. Why, when I was a boy... I wasn't "a great kid". I was kind of an @sshole. My dad gave me a '64 Rambler Classic (287ci) that had a very funny story attached to it that I won't get into here. But it was safe because I was wrapped in so much Detroit iron that I could have spent a day on the demo derby track and the paint would barely have been scratched. It's long gone, but I'm (gradually) restoring another one now and plan to put an (AMC) 327 in. My ultimate goal is to find an old tube car radio for it. If I can, it'll get the vanity plate "EMP HARD". 2. When my girls turned 16 (just under four years ago), the plan was to give them the '99 Forester that a friend had given me (it had been his dad's and the AT was funky). I replaced the tranny and cleaned it up and it gave us great service for a few years, then a deer wiped it out. We got more insurance money for it than expected, so I got a really nice '02 Forester (blown motor, but all mod cons) for $500 from a country junkyard. Put in a new motor, got everything cleaned up and dialed in, and then a deer wiped it out - just prior to their birthday. So with the insurance money we got another Forester ('01) for about $500, and other than it getting a little banged up when a moose ran them off the road on the way to school (them, not the moose, and it sounds funny, but that's actually very serious sh!t), they're still driving it (though it's seen a HG job, and later a full engine rebuild (spun rod bearing)). They're also on their second ragtop Mustang, but I won't get into that other than to say we jam econo. 3. A few years ago I drove by a used car dealer that had one of those portable fluorescent-moveable-letters signs out by the road. It said "30 CARS UNDER $15,000!" I did the mental math and thought, "yeah, that's about right." The moral of this story is: I'm really fsck'ing long-winded. No, not that, the other moral: New drivers, regardless of how "good" they are, need cheap cars that'll take a beating and keep them as safe as possible. 4WD good. $13K USD bad. Turbo bad - I don't have (and haven't had) one, but I'm surrounded by horror stories. I'm with you - I think he should start out with something more modest... and learn to pull a wrench so that if he wants to "graduate" into something sportier later it won't be a money pit.

Nothing obvious, and it had OEM HGs, so I suspect this is the first time it was pulled apart. I would tend toward GD's suggestion that they simply loosened the tolerances. If the shims had been juggled it'd be more likely that there'd be a random mix of clearances under and over spec, where what I'm seeing is pretty consistently over.

No - first place I looked. I did find what appears to be a cheaper ($275) version from Japan, though.

Wow - that's a lot of range. I feel much better about things now. Thanks a ton.

I can't honestly answer the question. It's a kit car I got a couple of years ago; bad HGs and a PO who'd started to pull it apart before realizing he was in over his head. So I jammed things back together just enough to get it to move around under its own steam, but as it was a severe coolant leak to the great outdoors, haven't run it more than a few miles. Didn't notice any noise, though. I just don't know what the limits are. Intake spec is 9.5 thou. What can I live with? 12? More? Btw, weird stuff found in the block's coolant passages. In addition to quite a bit of rust, this odd fibrous/powdery residue. I'm guessing it was some sort of panic sealant that didn't.

On an EZ30 ?!?! I've done it with EJ25s, but the timing cover on this thing is special, and it has to come off (front and back), along with all of the timing kit, before the front bearing cap can come off, before the cam can come off.

(nonquoting post deleted/replaced for clarity)

Now I'm a little weirded out. I just measured the other head, and most of the intake valves have excessive clearance (most by a couple of thou, but one by nearly 50%). This doesn't make a ton of sense to me. Other than the (obvious possibility) that the last person who worked on this thing screwed up the clearances, what would cause them to be consistently higher than spec? Lower is easy to understand - wear. But higher? I'm confused. One possibility that struck me is that my feeler gauges are NFG, but they mike out to exactly what they should be.

Not in this case - the gap is a little too great, so I need a thicker shim. I'm doing the other head today, so I'll see what the extent of the problem is.

Is there an affordable (the Subaru tool lists for about $1100) approach to depressing the lifters for shim removal? Otherwise I can't see getting these things in the yard without taking an entire engine - it's just not practical to disassemble the timing cover in order to remove the cams - or even the heads.

Poop. I've got a couple of intakes whose clearance is a little greater than spec. I was hoping for an easy interchange to solve it without adding a lot of time and hassle. There's an EZ30 (still) in the junkyard. That might be my only hope.

Does the early (e.g. '01) H6 use the same shims as the EJ25D?

Living out in the woods, I've never run across one of these things in the wild. Seems like a solution in search of a problem. I mean, how much oil will it actually recover in an engine that still has half-decent compression?